In the early hours of Monday, Sohaib Athar reported on his Twitter account that a loud bang had rattled his windows in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, saying he hoped “its not the start of something nasty.”

A few hours later Athar posted another tweet: “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”

In the age of Twitter, perhaps it’s no surprise that the first signs of the U.S. operation that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden were noticed by an IT consultant awake late at night.

Athar, a resident of Abbottabad where bin Laden was holed up, first noticed a helicopter and thought it unusual enough to post this on his Twitter account.